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Twitter's "Who to follow" tool, which harnesses users' social-media connections to help them find interesting people to follow, is more than just a gimmick, argues MG Siegler. The feature will vastly increase the rate at which people expand their follower lists, vastly boosting Twitter's interconnectivity -- albeit potentially at the cost of weakening the site's signal-to-noise ratio. "[T]his is going to greatly strengthen Twitter's social graph. It's seriously like social steroids," Siegler writes.

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Twitter's "who to follow" ad format, previously prominent only on PCs, now has higher visibility on mobile devices. The promoted account will appear under advertisers' tweets, integrating it with user streams.

Facebook should allow users to divide their friends into tiers, enabling them to maintain close relationships with genuine friends and more restrained connections to other acquaintances, argues MG Siegler. A bifurcated Facebook could combine the best features of its own roots as a closed college-based network with those of more open networks such as Twitter, Siegler argues. "It would be messy at first. It would mean backlash. But ultimately, I think it would truly make Facebook the center of social sharing," he writes.

Foursquare is poised to become a member, along with Twitter and Facebook, of the social-media "pantheon" -- but it's not there yet, writes MG Siegler. To cement its position, the location network needs to find exciting ways to keep people interested and retain a critical mass of users. "Simply put: Foursquare needs to change their game and needs to do it soon if they want to keep the momentum alive," Siegler argues. "They need to keep users engaged or they run the risk of becoming the Friendster of location."

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have come up with a way to calculate Twitter users' influence, and even to predict how far a given tweet will travel. The system bases its calculations on a given user's ability to get their tweets retweeted and their links visited. The Twitter feeds of Google, Michelle Malkin, the Onion and Joko Anwar, a filmmaker from Indonesia, are among the most influential accounts on Twitter, according to the system.

The SXSW festival is turning into a battlefield for Foursquare and Gowalla's war to become the dominant location-based social network, writes MG Siegler. So far, the two networks are effectively in a dead heat, Siegler writes, as some data suggest that conference attendees are checking into the two sites in roughly equal numbers. "In other words, the war is still raging," he writes.